The Conjure Book

by A. A. Attanasio

  Jane pushed to her feet, her back against a metal crossbeam, and the night wind tugged at her with icy hands. Anger lashed through her as she realized that this elemental creature intended to shove her to her death and then dance around her shattered corpse the way he had probably danced after he had killed her mother.

  “No!” She started to cry tears of rage, her fists pounding her thighs. “I hate you!” She slid sideways to evade the crouching beast preparing to pounce on her. She teetered at the edge of the platform, nowhere left to go, and her shivering hands fumbled with her costume and yanked free the conjure book. She waved it threateningly. “I’m going to hit you!”

  “Janey, sweetheart, the only place you’re going is down!” The spirit fox snarled with triumphal hostility and reared back on his haunches, front claws spread to blinding arcs of white fire. “Enjoy the trip!”

  “Yoo-hoo, Mister E!” Jeoffry called from atop the ceramic insulator coils. While Trick E had focused on Jane, the cat had crawled up the metal scaffolding and across a connecting beam to the transformers. He waved with one cheerful paw at the demonic fox then dropped, landing with all his spirit force onto the lever, pushing it down.

  Nothing happened.

  “Trick — no treat!” The spirit fox cut a radiant grin at Jane. “I was in your school’s computer system, smarty, and I tricked your conjure knowledge. This is a dead switch. It doesn’t control anything. You failed the faerïe, you twit. Now you’ve got nothing.”

  Jane’s blanched face abruptly darkened. A vein swelled at her temple, and her eyes shed cold brightness. “You want the conjure book?” she asked through clenched teeth and upheld the grimoire in a shaking hand. “You want it?”

  “Like you have a choice!” Trick E gloated, glittering around the edges as he closed in.

  “Let him have the grimoire, Jane!” Jeoffry called from where he cringed beside the cylindrical transformers. “Give him what he wants!”

  “Take it!” Jane tossed the conjure book into the night.

  Trick E watched the grimoire arc through the moonlight like a falling stone, then fixed Jane with a hostile stare cored with darkness.

  Jane shoved her right hand under her costume, again pretending to reach for salt. She held the spirit fox’s menacing gaze with tight, unblinking eyes, daring him to come closer.

  “The grimoire is mine!” Trick E smirked. “And I’m going to shred it to confetti before I rip you to pieces!” He dove off the platform and descended to the ground in a resplendent rainbow of fire colors.

  Jane stood at the very edge, face a wrathful mask. “You lose, sucker,” she whispered hotly. “It’s not the book that’s got the power now. It’s me. I’m the witch.” She leaned forward into the wind and drew a deep breath.

  Jeoffry thought she meant to jump, and he called out, “You did the right thing! Don’t despair!”

  But Jane wasn’t despairing. She was raging. She raised both arms above her head and wailed, “Fire!” Twice more she screamed at the moony night. Both times, she shook so violently with the force of her invocation that her familiar quailed, expecting her to plunge off the platform.

  And then, she stood eerily still and spoke in a cold voice: “People belong to earth and nature, too! — Fire! Civilization comes from you! — Fire of life, of love and what love can do! — Don’t let this spirit fox work his evil! — Take away his strength to destroy and kill! — Powers and spirits of storm clouds and sky! — Obey the majesty of my hurt cry! — Lightning! Fire from on high! Strike with force and make him die!”

  An enormous cloud of boiling moonlight swirled overhead. In thundery stillness and swelling darkness, Trick E’s sparkling body paused on the ground below with one luminous paw upon the conjure book. His hot green eyes peered up at high silence and purple flashes of lightning that silhouetted a swelling cumulus.

  “Jane! Cease at once! You can’t fight evil with evil!” Jeoffry’s voice frightened him in the vast hush, and he moaned in a horrified breath, “You’ve become like he is!”

  The tips of Jane’s faerïe-twisted hair glittered with crystals of frosty fire. Blue snowflakes of electricity crackled into blusters of spinning sparks as she angrily shook her head. “I don’t care!” She brought her hands down forcefully, with a fierce shout, and lightning ripped across the sky.

  The blinding bolt struck the ground close to Trick E and sent him bouncing like a blazing tumbleweed. Thunder exploded.

  “Jane!” Jeoffry yelled against the deafening boom. “Stop! This is wrong!”

  The teen witch threw her hands up and brought them down with another jagged lightning stroke. The searing thunderbolt stabbed the ground where Trick E sprawled, and he flitted away pummeled by thunder.

  Another lash of lightning scorched the air directly behind him — and another slashed the space where he was fleeing.

  With demented furor, Jane writhed, arms pumping like a mad woman, hurling a volley of blue fire at the skittering spirit fox. The bolts of dazzling force ignited the horizon, and the ensuing eruption of thunderclaps shook the switching tower and forced Jane back from the edge.

  Smoldering with rage, she pointed to the swaying cables of high-tension wires. A coiling python of electricity struck the power lines alongside her and severed one of the wires with a brutal blare of shooting voltage that made her double-over.

  The whipping cable snaked twice over her head hissing deadly fireworks before it dropped. It flailed in mid-air, showering sparks across sudden darkness as power to the surrounding area cut off with a low groan.

  Streetlights on the road below and along all the distant intersections across the countryside blacked out, and the moon and the stars splattered brighter in the clearing sky.

  Jane staggered backward against the metal scaffolding, exhausted by her enraged attack. The static halo that had flared from the tips of her spiked hair faded away. With a fatigued and victorious expression, she stared up at stars and a blissful moon among tattering storm clouds. “I did it,” she mumbled. “I paid the faerïe debt.”

  “Jane!” Jeoffry clawed at the witch’s black dress. “Trick E is up to something hideous!”

  From across the night fields, a zigzag of fire streaked. At the writhing cable of shooting sparks, Trick E blurred to a knot of smeared light. Then, he caught the line of spitting current between his jaws and flew with it directly at Jane.

  “Run!” Jeoffry bawled. “Back away! Now!”

  Trick E was too fast. In an instant, he descended on them with the fuming cable spurting clots of electric fire.

  Jane saw the malicious glee in his sharp green eyes, heard the fatal voltage rasping, and smelled the air torn to ozone.

  Her heart hammered one hard mortal thud as death flared upon her. Sharp needles of pain flashed up her leg and across her chest, and Jeoffry — shouting “Jane!” — leaped between her and the burning cable.

  The familiar’s body collided with the high-tension wire at the same instant that his front claws grabbed Trick E’s snout. The electric current that sluiced through the cat lifted all his fur straight out, ran blue and liquid along the length of his stretched body, and burned into the spirit fox with a scream like buckling metal.

  Trick E convulsed a crazed death dance in mid-air. His green eyes buzzed in his x-rayed skull with electrocuted agony and widened to a horrified realization of his doom before his whole body combusted in a glare of blue fire.

  The loud whoosh hurled Jane off her feet. She collapsed onto the mesh platform under a gust of sparks that twittered into the wind. And where the spirit fox had been, only a wicked-out twist of black smoke lingered.

  Jeoffry dropped into Jane’s lap, fur singed, irises blown wide.

  Jane sat upright, stunned. The abrupt catastrophe had stolen her breath. And with a strangled sob, she clutched the cat to her chest, trying to hug life back into him. The familiar’s limp body dangled inertly against her.

  “No, Jeoffry! Don’t be dead!” She gently shook her familiar. “Don
’t be dead!”

  The cat stirred, mewed weakly and blinked at her, stupefied.

  “Jeoffry! Oh, Jeoffry!”

  The cat meowed and lay shuddering in her arms.

  “Jeoffry?” She stroked the back of the cat’s neck and peered into its dilated eyes. “You’re not Jeoffry, are you?”

  The cat meowed again and began to cry, hungry, cold, and wanting to go home.

  “Okay, okay.” Jane sagged. “Sh-h-h, Lester.” She held the cat warmly against her as tears welled in her eyes. “It’s okay. You just lie here with me. I’m going to take care of you. It’s okay.”

  With her sleeve, she wiped her eyes. The cat calmed and curled up tightly against her. “Make yourself comfortable. Shh. It looks like we’re not going anywhere for a while.”

  She stared down through the mesh platform and steel girders that crisscrossed to the moonlit ground. She watched the severed high-tension line continue to sway and fitfully spark. “I think we’re going to have to wait until morning before anybody finds us up here.”

  Jane leaned back against the transformer struts and heaved a huge sigh. “Jeoffry — I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”

  Tears came again, and her face warped. Through the blurry film of her tears, moonlight dazzled. Drifts of ice needles, like snow flurries, swam before her, and she daubed at her eyes again. When she could see clearly, she faced a landscape of twinkling motes brimming across the moonbright and rolling countryside.

  “The faerïe!” A sad smile touched her trembling lips. “Look, Lester. The faerïe have come out. The faerïe have come out to dance.”

  Under the stars’ toilings and the moon’s raptures, the faerïe touched the night with their magnetic bodies and danced. They danced like the gnomes and the fabled dead of Samhain, celebrating life, the Reaper’s twin.

  Breath Flowers

  Jane huddled against the cold night wind. Yet, the cold inside her hurt worse. Jeoffry was dead. For a while, she knelt at the edge of the platform with the frigid wind tugging at her hair. She called out to the faerïe, hoping that they would respond.

  They danced oblivious to her. Their glimmering bodies far below softly blew in the gray moonlight. She even shouted Alfred’s name several times, thinking that the faerïe girl who had helped her escape the hollow hills might hear. The windy night stole her cries.

  When she finally settled down, Lester fell asleep in her lap. The tips of his body looked singed — smudged as if with charcoal along the edges of his ears and the ends of his paws. Otherwise, he seemed uninjured from the deadly electricity that had passed through him. Jeoffry had conducted the current with his own ectoplasmic body, surely knowing that the voltage would kill him and spare Lester.

  “Some scaredy cat.”

  To keep from crying again, she concentrated on watching the smoke of her breath bloom in the cold air. Breath flowers carried her body heat into the moonlight, blossoming briefly, then vanishing. They reminded her of the ghostly fumes seen so commonly in Halloween images of witch houses and cemeteries. Those paltry vapors exhaled from graves haunted the air with lost and forgotten lives — the breath of all mortal things. Out of the lungs of the earth came the heat of life and its dance of vanishing.

  Jane leaned back against a cold steel support and closed her eyes. These thoughts felt too big for her head. She tried to sleep. The cold kept shivering her awake, and she again watched her breath flowers, her moment of life blowing into the wind and the cold. She shuddered deeper.

  What is the point of living if everything comes to death? Why had Jeoffry tried so hard for so many centuries to survive and reach the Twilight only to — to disappear? Where is he now? Or Trick E and Hyssop Joan? Or Alfred?

  “These are stupid questions,” she said aloud, wanting to break the rhythm of her strange thoughts and stop them from troubling her.

  But Jeoffry was dead. He had died to save her, and she would never see him again to thank him. She wanted to thank him, not just for keeping her alive but for trying to preserve her soul.

  No remorse troubled her for having attempted to blast Trick E — but she did regret that she had not fulfilled the desire of Jeoffry and Hyssop Joan to make of herself a benevolent witch and earn a way into the Twilight for her friends. She had betrayed them by using the might of Wicca for vengeance instead of for life and the wisdom of ‘wic.’

  “‘Wic,’” she voiced the strange word. “‘Wic’ — vitality — life.” She gazed shivering at the moon and the haze of stars. “Jeoffry believed I am a witch. And Hyssop Joan gave me her conjure book for my own. And I stopped Trick E without the conjure book. But then, that must mean…” She hugged herself against the cold and her own deepening doubt. “But then, that means that if I really am a witch, the wisdom of life is already mine.” She frowned and gazed up at the starry heavens. “What is it?”

  The answer seemed to lie in the dark places between the stars, where her breath flowers disappeared. “The cold, the emptiness…” She nodded to the moon. “Yes, I do understand. I’ve always understood, haven’t I? I learned this wisdom from my mother. We vanish. All life vanishes. But there’s something bigger than life and all of life’s hurts.” She gently laid her hands on the sleeping cat. “Corny as it sounds — it’s love that lasts.”

  She smiled at that idea and another thought followed: “Life is not made to last. But before death says no, life has a chance to say yes. That yes — of course! — that yes is love.” Her smile warmed her with this exciting truth. “To love life, despite the cold, despite the darkness and the not-knowing — to love life is to say yes, to celebrate and dance, like the faerïe!”

  The moon slid down the sky while Jane turned these thoughts over in her mind. Jeoffry had not died for nothing. Nor had her mother. They had taught her to say yes. And she determined that, even though she had failed to become a benevolent witch, she would not fail to remember that the wisdom of life is love.

  The bloated moon set, and the faerïe lights dimmed under hazy rays of the rising sun. In that golden mist rose a loamy, autumnal fragrance from out of the stubbled fields. Above the empty country road running parallel to the high-tension lines and their giant scaffold towers, a helicopter coughed, searching for the source of last night’s outage.

  They spotted Jane and radioed for help. A short while later, a wailing fire truck and an electric company van escorted by two police cars with blue lights whirling raced down the country road to rescue her.

  As the fire company’s motorized basket lowered Jane and Lester to the ground, her father’s car arrived. He jumped out, flustered, scowling with worry. When she stepped out of the metal basket, he wrapped her in a police blanket and embraced her so tightly she could hardly breathe. She realized then that her ribs and muscles no longer ached. The faerïe bruises had faded to painless smudges.

  Once Ethan finished holding her and once he ascertained that she was all right, he wanted to know why he found her so far from town and how she had gotten up the tower. Two electric company workers in blue jumpsuits and hardhats, a stocky police officer and the firefighter who had escorted Jane down in the basket waited attentively for her answer.

  “Lester ran away,” she lied, knowing no one would believe the truth. “Before I knew it, I was way out here.”

  “Eight miles from town?” Ethan asked, incredulous. “And this tower? How’d you manage to get stuck up there?”

  Jane made no attempt to hide her exhaustion and unhappiness. She passed a wrung look among her rescuers. “I don’t know,” she mumbled. “It was dark. I was scared. I just wanted to get my cat back.”

  “There are bafflers on the foundation beams,” one of the electric company workers said. “It’s not possible to get up there without a hoist or a very big ladder.”

  “I don’t think I climbed,” Jane admitted and tried a weary smile. “I was too tired by the time I got out here. Maybe I flew.”

  The laughter that sparkled from everyone except her father assured Jane th
at the charming elixir she had sprayed on Lester/Jeoffry still worked. She thought of trying out a forgetting spell but dismissed that idea right away. She was done with magic. Jeoffry had died. And Alfred? Her mind dropped off a cliff when she thought of all the grief she had caused with her witchcraft.

  “Let’s go home,” Ethan said, reading her deep sorrow for exhaustion.

  “Just a sec.” Jane waded into the brown grass surrounding the switching tower. Not far from where the high-tension line dangled — inert now that the technicians had cut the power — she found the conjure book. It felt damp from dew. A scorch mark had burned the leather cover with the shape of a fox paw print.

  “What’s that?” Ethan asked.

  “An old book of spells,” Jane replied sadly. “I was carrying it around on Halloween to make me feel like a witch, remember?”

  Ethan took the grimoire and turned it in his hands. The pages had fused, and there was not much to see. He gave it back without any understanding in his eyes.

  During the drive to Bosky Glen, he peppered her with questions, and she would have told him the truth if he hadn’t been driving and she could have looked him in the eyes and made him believe her. Instead, Jane pleaded ignorance and weariness, intending to tell him everything once they got home — especially the part about how important holding the secret close had been for her.

  Ethan had to double park in front of Bosky Glen, and by this Jane knew something was up. She figured her disappearance had caused a stir among everyone at school enamored of her because of her Halloween spell and they had gathered at her home to keep vigil.

  When she walked through the front door, she wondered if there might be some way to counteract this devilish charm now that her ambition to become a witch had died with Jeoffry — and she almost had to sit down right there in the foyer, because she thought she confronted a ghost.